The present invention relates generally to radio or wireless communications and, more particularly, relates to a method for attaching an advertisement or coupon to an SMS message for wireless transmission.
The advent of wireless personal communications devices has revolutionized the telecommunications industry. Cellular, PCS and other services provide wireless personal communications to businesses and individuals at home, in the office, on the road, and any other locations the wireless network reaches. Wireless telephone subscribers no longer have to use pay telephones along the road, or wait until they return home or to the office to check messages and return important business calls. Instead, wireless subscribers carry out their day to day business from their cars, from the jobsite, while walking along the airport concourse, and just about anywhere their signals are accessible.
Thus, it is no surprise that since the introduction of the cellular telephone service, the number of wireless telephone subscribers has increased steadily. Today, the number of wireless telephone subscribers is staggering and still growing rapidly. In fact, many households have multiple wireless telephones in addition to their conventional land-line services.
With a market of this size, there is fierce competition among hardware manufacturers and service providers. In an attempt to lure customers, most providers offer handsets with desirable features or attributes such as small size, light weight, longer battery life, speed dial, and so forth. Many recent additions to the marketplace include multi-functional handsets that even provide pocket-organizer functions integrated into the wireless handset. Most manufacturers, however, are still scrambling to add new features to their communication devices to snare a portion of this booming market.
One desirable feature is for a remote server to be able to monitor for certain conditions and alert the wireless user when those conditions occur. Along with the alert message, it may be desirable to provide advertising or promotional material based on the user""s location, profile and content of the alert message. Conventional SMS (Short Message Service) message formats used by wireless devices, however, are limited to particular message types and lengths.
The present invention is directed toward a system and method for attaching an advertisement to an SMS alert message for wireless transmission.
In one embodiment of the invention, a monitoring and alert system is provided. The system includes a requesting device that has a transmitter for sending a monitoring request and a receiver for receiving an alert message over a wireless communication network. In one implementation, the requesting device is a wireless communication handset or a personal computer.
A remote server communicates with the requesting device over the network. The server receives the monitoring request from the requesting device and monitors for the conditions specified by the requesting device in the monitoring request. When the conditions are met, the server generates an SMS alert message and appends an ad message to the alert message in the remaining message space to create a composite alert/ad message. The server then sends the composite alert/ad message to the requesting device.
In one implementation, the system also includes a position determination device for determining the location of the requesting device. The requesting device provides the location, along with user profile information, to the server to assist in generation of the composite message. The server may comprise an agent server that monitors for the conditions specified by the requesting device; an ad server that generates the ad message; and an alert server that generates the alert message and appends the ad message to the alert message to create the composite message.
In another embodiment of the present invention, a method for appending an advertisement to an SMS alert message is provided. The method includes the steps of:
(a) determining the maximum length in characters of the SMS message;
(b) generating an alert portion of the message;
(c) determining the available advertising message space by subtracting the length in characters of the alert portion from the maximum message length;
(d) determining whether the available advertising message space is sufficient for placement of an advertisement; and
(e) if the available space is sufficient, generating the advertisement and appending it to the first portion of the SMS message.
Objects and advantages of the present invention include any of the foregoing, singly or in combination. Further objects and advantages will be apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art, or will be set forth in the following disclosure.